Forum Changes to Poetry Category, Your feedback welcome! Options

[Cleo_Serapis]

Hello everyone reading this tile!  

A while ago, James and I had a conversation regarding site navigation and forum layout. James has kindly mentioned this topic to me again this morning which I believe has great merit and will summarize here in the thread.  

New visitors to MM often times get overwhelmed by all the forum offerings (mostly in the Poetry area). I've just made one merge a few minutes ago for the less frequented forum "Garden of Eden" formerly for polished works - not for critique. I have taken all the posts in there and merged them into "Plato's Pearls of Wisdom" and slightly re-worded the forum description. Now, the new and improved forum shall be used as follows:

Plato's Pearls of Wisdom (Exhibition - NOT for Critique)
Posts in this forum are for exhibition and polished works only. Post here only when poet feels their work is polished or does not seek a critique. Thanks for adding tiles to our Mosaic! All forms of poetry are welcome in this forum.
The 1:3:2 rule applies here. See forum rules for more details.

I am also planning to have also merged Punner's Paradise (Comedic Themes), and The Fountain of Youth (Youthful Themes) into Angkor Wat Accolades (Seasonal Works) and re-worded it as 'Themed Works - Not for Critique'.

Now for the REAL challenge:  
We would like to CHANGE the format of Homer's Homilies (Poetry for GENTLE Critique) AND Socrates’ Synapse (Poetry for COMPLEX Critique).

Most of our writers already provide a complex or thorough critique to those posts in Homers. Questions have arisen with regard to Socrates. To quote James (Jox):

There are more poems than ever on MM and two or three posting forums may be justified - but I would suggest along different lines than at present. Maybe one could be form poems and another freeform? A third could be non-form rhyming and so on.

I am in agreement with James' idea in that I would like make a change to both forums and do away with a 'gentle' verses 'complex' critique division.

The idea is to change Homers to be a 'structured R & M (form) poetry' forum and Socrates to a 'non-structured (freeform) poetry' forum.

If our members agree, it will take me a while to move the posts accordingly between Homers and Socrates but all in all, I  like the sound   and beat   of this idea and I feel it would be an improvement to MM's forum board.

On a second note, I would also like to begin a forum for external competitions offered elsewhere on the Internet - perhaps within Incan Inversions?
Any suggestions and referals are most welcome!

Your feedback is appreciated all!  

Cheers!


~Cleo  

[Guest__*]

Dear Cleo,

Suddenly, I KNOW why MM site navigation is so hard !

On many poetry sites, eg Poem train, the MAIN group heading AND the sub headings AND the description/instructs are all visible at the same time, while here, we only have the MAIN HEADING, then we have to click and search the sub-headings separately.

The nearest we get to a full, easy-to-follow listing is the "Forum Jump" place, where there is a bare skeletal version, of headings only, of what Poem Train supplies in its main listings.

I've been here since nearly day 1, and I was lost the other day trying to find where the archives were hidden !

Cleo, have a look at Poem Train at http://www.poemtrain.com/cgi-bin/yabb/YaBB.cgi
to see what I mean.

As to amending Homer & Socrates, I agree that the level of crit is pretty damn good, and deep, in both, and have noted that the amount of traffic in Soc is derisory.

My only problem with the proposed change is, I can't say that I know what is a structed or form poem from a not- one !

Would Homer be strictly for vilanelles, sonnets, haiku and limericks (etc) ? Or would any say 4-line x 4 poem qualify ? Rhymed or not ? Opportunities for more confusion, I'd say.

My way to go would be to have 3 separate AND EQUAL posting forums, A, B and C, so that prolific poets like Jox and Cleo and me could in effect rotate them, and post one poem a day. I have to confess I have found it frustrating to have to wait 3 days to post another, when I might have written 4 in a day, and going to the present Soc has not worked because of the low traffic volume, caused I think by other poets' trepidation re the heavy crit rules. So barely any crit there at all.

If we had 3 equal fora (um, is that right ? ) then we would also avoid slap on the wrist situations where a poem is deemed to be in the "wrong" one ! (Cuz my wrists hurt easy). Thus we simplify even more.

We could run a comp to name the new ABC fora, say Archimedes, Boccaccio and Copernicus ?

Love
Alan (profesional simpleton)